Financial Improvement Programme

The Financial Improvement Programme (FIP) is a comprehensive programme of schemes which identify efficiencies that have a financial benefit, enabling the Board to achieve financial balance.

The FIP Project Management Office team was established mid-February 2018 and the programme has developed to form a systematic and forensic analysis across every area of the Board to identify opportunities for savings and efficiencies.

These have focused on areas of spend and working practices, identifying the potential for efficiency improvements and removing waste from our ways of working. The programme is based on a proven methodology, and is underpinned by a robust and comprehensive governance process and a programme management office (PMO). The PMO is a small team designed to work with the wider organisation teams in throughout the organisation to capture, document and deliver to the Programmes aims, which are reviewed regularly via the FIP Programme Board.

2018-19 Achievements

From all the tremendous efforts of the Workstreams and their teams, we achieved full year effect recurring Savings of £43m at the end of 2018-19. We contained expenditure in key areas and reduced overspends by £5m and as such, the unachieved savings in 2018-19 and the non-recurring element of the achieved savings, created a underlying recurring deficit of £48m (reduced from £68m) going into 2019/20

2019-20

To minimise the forecast deficit in 2019-20, the Financial Improvement Programme continues to work to:

Reign in areas of overspend and ensure delivery of balanced budgets at March 2020

Identify additional FIP Schemes (Locally and Nationally)

Deliver ongoing existing schemes and increase any potential yield

Identify additional sources of Income and Savings opportunities

One of the key components of the Financial Improvement Programme is listening and acting on saving or efficiencies ideas from staff. To this effect, the Small Change Matters scheme was initially launched towards the end of 2017 and reinvigorated in 2018, in order to gather ideas and turn them in to real changes where possible. What is evident from the suggestions being received is that frontline staff are often the best people to spot waste and suggest better ways of working and we encourage everyone to consider their workplace and possible opportunities to get best value for money

Small Change Matters has its own area on this site - please do keep on sending us your ideas and see the site for examples of what has been sent in already.

At the end of its first year an internal review of the FIP was carried out on what has worked well, what improvements could be made and what other opportunities are there to further engage staff with other ways to make efficiencies - not just financial. We have actively been working on these suggestion from the teams who form part of the FIP Project Teams to the wider organisation via SCM Surveys.